Movement and sound: the phonatory apparatus as a defining element of Dieter Schnebel's performative work

Abstract

The graphic representation of body movement is the basis for the transmission of different types of dances since the twentieth century. Without them, there would certainly be no way to maintain the 'repertoire' ballet that was installed in the nineteenth century and evolved on a large scale to the largest concert halls in the twentieth century. Dieter Schnebel, as an avant-garde composer of the last century, a frequent attendee of the summer meetings in Darmstad and a companion of the revolutionaries Stockhausen and Boulez, found himself in the contingency of, taking into account his vision of performance that involves the sonorities of the body, as a whole, and of the speaking instrument in particular, to create scores that note not sounds but how to produce them, ensuring the dramatic expression of what is intended, rather than the accuracy of frequency and duration portrayed in conventional systems. We focus on these scores of physiological movements, situating them within the aesthetic context in which they appear and highlighting their significance for the development of the concept of future performance art.